Friday, September 25, 2009

There are several web services which are locked to particular regions. Hulu and Pandora, for instance, are available only for US residents. In order to access these sites from outside the regions they are meant for, you have to trick them into believing you reside inside those regions or countries. One way to achieve that is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

A Virtual Private Network is often faster than proxies and offer stable connections. Now, you can either go for a paid VPN service or get a free VPN service. If you decide to pay you have several options open, but free VPNs are hard to come by. Also they can’t promise you’ll always get a US IP address.

Watching Hulu from outside US

Enter HideIPVPN. This free VPN service is the only one that offers you US and UK based IP addresses, and you decide which country’s IP address you want. Want to watch Hulu? Use their US servers. Want to stream music from Spotify? Switch to a UK server. HideIPVPN is the only one I know that offers this kind of flexibility.

Using HideIPVPN you can successfully bypass the region-lock of Hulu, Pandora, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, Veoh and anything that’s available only on the US and UK. Suddenly, I feel free again.

Watching BBC iPlayer from outside UK

HideIPVPN provides fast connections allowing you to enjoy stutter free streaming videos from Hulu and other video sites. Not only that, their encrypted connections and hidden IP address offers you complete anonymity while surfing the Internet. HideIPVPN also doesn’t keep any logs.

HideIPVPN is available as a free service, but there are also Premium accounts. The only major difference between free and premium accounts is that the latter can connect using OpenVPN which is more secure and more stable than PPTP. The premium accounts are available for as low as $6 for UK IPs and $10 for US IPs per month. Again, these rates are by far the lowest I have known.

Limited accounts giveaway

In order to maintain the quality of their service and prevent users from bringing down the servers, the number of both free and premium accounts are limited. HideIPVPN opens only 100 free accounts for registration at the beginning of each month. This month’s quota is long gone. But here is some good news. I have 15 free accounts to giveaway exclusively for Instant Fundas readers.

To grab your free account, click on this link and apply the Promo code INSTANTFUNDAS. Don’t worry about the $8.99 price you see. That will go away once you checkout.

This is strictly on a first come first basis. If you miss it, you'll have to wait till next month.